ad agency solution needed

February 18, 200124 yr

Newbies

i have an existing job ticket system, which needs to be improved and time sheets and supplier info all needs to be dumped in to a job ticket database, as well as media bookings etc etc, and then into an accounting pkg.

has somone out there developed a framework for a typical pr and ad agency

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February 18, 200124 yr

I was in the same boat as you but was unable to find somthing that came close to meeting all of our needs. I'm now writing my own! I would suggest that you you look at doing the same. I was amazed of the things that we can do.

Devin

February 19, 200124 yr

We're polishing one (it is being used by our agency as we speak and has reduced average billing time from 2 weeks to 6 hours after job completion).

It has a tabbed interface, estimating, multiple invoicing per job, a pop up calendar, separate tracking of POs and in house labor and materials. Job costing and comparison to estimates. We have put every interface trick we could find to make data entry easy as well as make the traffic and accounting people happy. (can you tell I am proud of it?)

Basically, trying to creating a product that is way easier to use and more usefull than the other stuff on the market that sells for $20,000 or more.

In the process of finishing print estimation and milestone scheduling and just starting the media buying module. Also halfway done with Palm pilot integration and auto web updates for clients. Have implemented log-ins by person but no password stuff yet.

Also has a cool Applescript thingy that auto creates job folders and can open related folders from our server from Filemaker. (Chuck from this forum did a majority of that work).

Does great invoicing and estimation but not an accounting package. We just upload files into Quickbooks.

Filemaker is unbelievably powerful for something like this but is also a curse. You can't stop if somethng is good enough, you have to make it PERFECT.

I looked forever for a product that did what we needed but that the creatives would actually use and couldn't find it. Good luck to you. If you want to know more about what my agency is doing, you can email me.